Friday, November 8, 2013

How to: Academic Writing for the Humanities Part 2

Part 1 is here. This part, heavy into "coding" may sound unnatural or forced. Again, these first two parts are for those struggling with the writing PROCESS. Grounded Theory (GT), qualitative data analysis (QDA), and the coding process may not be for everyone, but they will help those who feel lost in the research part of a research paper.

A note on coding -- when I first wrote this presentation, Twitter had not IPO'ed and news media were not using "tags" in all of their stories. So anywhere the word "code" or "coding" appears, it could easily be changed to "hashtag" or "tag."

OK,
I'm done reading everything and have excerpted everything I want to
excerpt. Now what?

This
is where the “A” in QDA starts to happen. Go through all your
excerpts and look for “themes.” These themes
will be your major organization groups. In some cases, you can treat
them as a “parent code.” After finding major themes, you'll want
to start looking for specific codes that you'll use to organize your
data. This IS analysis, by the way. These should be words or short
phrases that sum up what the excerpt is about. Many times, codes can
be found within the QD. For instance, if you're doing a paper on
gamers and the term “newb” keeps coming up, this is an in
vivo
code – a code made by the informants themselves. Use it. Same can
be said for typologies developed by the informants themselves (in
this case your authors).

You'll know you're done developing codes when every excerpt can be
classified into a code. This is called “saturation.” And yes, a
code could very well be “misc” or “unclassified.” This is
especially true of any excerpts you want to save for later research
that don't directly apply to the current question(s).

Here is the rough draft of my themes/codes for a paper:

This list isn't quite useful yet. Many of these themes are actually
subthemes of others. The best way to do this would be to have each
theme on a Post-It note and sort themes into groups and then place
related groups next to each other, etc. until you get a visual form
of your mental concept. For my themes, I decided on three main
themes. Here's what I ended up with:

All done!

Not
quite. Now that you have your codes, you need to go through all your
excerpts and assign them their codes in WeftQDA. Excerpts can have
more than one code as well. The reason you're doing this will become
clear (and awesome) in the next step. So just get it done . . .

OK that took awhile, this next step better be good.

Now
you can ask WeftQDA to show you all the excerpts that are coded
“_____” and look at each excerpt across author. Yes, you could
have done this on your own with copy and pasting or with different
colored highlighters, etc., but it would have taken a long time. It
is at this point that you'll realize how important it was to begin
each excerpt with author initials and page number – when they're
organized by code they're all jumbled up. It would be very hard to go
back to the original text and check context and citation information
without this step.

Now that you see all your excerpts across authors sorted by codes,
you can better analyze this data. You don't need to print out 12 PDFs
and lay them on your floor and try to keep track of what neat quote
you saw where that goes with this other neat theory from so-and-so
which you thought you put here but is actually hidden under another
paper . . . etc. THIS is where the good analysis happens.

This process looks really tiring and cumbersome. More trouble than
it's worth.

It
may be for some people. They're probably better off not using it. But
for people who struggle with the writing process, more structure is
often a good thing while they get “used to” writing academic
papers. This process might be a life saver for someone's first
semester or two and then might become superfluous afterwards. Or it
might be great for certain types of papers and unnecessary for
others. If you get A's on papers already, keep doing your thing. If
you're worried about your grade, it might be worth it to try this
out.